Grey water management in rural Guatemala

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by IvanK, Oct 22, 2013.

  1. IvanK

    IvanK New Member

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    Hi all,

    I'm working with small-scale scale farmers in Guatemala, and we're just about to enter into the dry season. I'm looking to start using grey water to keep bio-intensive gardens going through the dry months. Would anyone have any suggestions, using mostly local resources that would be available in small rural communities. Our main problem is that most soaps here are fairly caustic, and almost all contain phosphates, so I'm not sure what kind of filtration system we could use that would be cheap but effective. Any comments or links would be greatly appreciated!
    Best,
    Ivan
     
  2. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    The system I have seen recently used a large plastic water trough for animals, converted into a worm farm, that functioned as a grease trap / filter / purification system. Fill it with compost and compostable matter and worms and cover it. Water goes on the top, filters through and comes out the bottom and is distributed through a series of pipes to final destinations and is allowed to leak out of buried perforated pipes so that it doesn't smell or sit on the ground. Sorry I don't have a link - am happy to give more detail if that isn't clear enough.
     
  3. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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  4. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    there are other approaches too:

    - see if you can get people to use less caustic soaps or find other soaps, even perhaps learning to make them from local sources.

    - build in a valve so that the most caustic flows can be turned aside into a more heavily processed system or separate that flow if it is always from one source (like a clothes washer).

    - try to have people use less soap in general. sometimes people use way too much, a lot more than they need. the manufacturers like it when they do, but often you can get by with less. taking many liquid soaps and dilluting them half and half is often fairly undetectable in performance.

    - using plant based scouring to get most of the crud off before washing with a degreaser. saves a lot of soap.
     

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